Aikido would have been better suited to a place long long ago, in a galaxy far far away, such as that in Star Wars. The esoteric mysticism must have links with the jedi 'force'. And besides, just look at the similarities here:

Just to toss my 2 cents in. I played around with the UGA aikido club for a couple of months and I have to say, if one of those guys gets a hold of you then can toss you around pretty good. I worked with the instructor and was uncooperative on the throws, not to the point of punching him in the head or anything, but mostly I was just checking out the mechanics. He was able to toss me pretty hard even when I was being uncooperative, trying to escape, etc... So it seems like the principals behind the mechanics are sound. Though I think you would have to be quite good to apply those principals in a confrontation.

I do have an eyewitness account of Aikido working on T3h Str33t though. No video to accompany it unfortunately. I was at a friends house, we came back from dinner, there was a cop in the parking lot talking to a guy. After a minute the guy turns around and takes maybe a half step away. The cop grabs him by the left wrist and by the head and face plants him into the ground. The motion was identical to ones I saw with the Aikido club.
So yeah, you can't say that getting someone to faceplant onto the concrete isn't going to be effective. It's whether you can pull that off or not for real that will make the difference.